The way businesses use customer information gathered from data through the use of business intelligence and analytics tools needs to tread carefully in order to not cross over from creating a personal, customised experience into being creepy.
That was the consensus to come out of a panel discussion about business intelligence and big data at the Air Transport IT Summit in Brussels.
"The question about what is creepy is relative to the person," said John-Paul Clarke, director of the Air Transportation Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
"If we're going to do something like that, it's for people themselves to set what the bounds are, so entities like airlines can work within those bounds. Because you can't have a one size fits all for what's creepy, and ultimately it's going to be down to the person to determine how much information they share."
Clarke contrasted his own use of Facebook – he doesn't share pictures of his family – to that of someone who is much more open about what they share.
"Some people go to the bathroom and they put it on Facebook. Clearly someone who does that would not be creeped out, but someone like me would be creeped out," he said.
"There has to be a conversation at some point between social media, gurus and the commericial entities about how do you actually achieve that. Otherwise it will be trial and error and in that a lot of things can happen and there's friction which can be painful which is no good for business.
"[What is classed as creepy] has to be user defined."
Jim Peters, CTO at SITA told the audience that air passengers had previously been "creeped out" over the airline having access to their image on a tablet by taking it from social media, despite them using it in order to make the experience better for the passenger.
"We went on Facebook and LinkedIn and pulled in all the photos of people on the plane and they're like, ‘Argh! How did you do that?'. We reply, 'They're public profiles, these people have their picture up their publically and we found them'," said Peters, adding, "I think it will be an area that evolves and goes from person to country to culture and age."
According to Joshua Marks, CEO of aviation-focused big data analytics platform masFlight, if customer data is used correctly – in that if the right passengers are targeted – there will not be any reason for them to feel unnerved.
"What it boils down to is being able to segment your customers as well," he said.
"Take the American-European context where you have defined elite programmes and they already allow you to volunteer a significant amount of information about your preferences. I don't think it's a major stretch at all for a network carrier to offer you the chance to upload your picture, in which case it's voluntary participation.
"I think that voluntary aspect is the key. If you invite somebody to share information so they get treated better, I can see a very high level of adoption," Marks added.
